Old Joliet Prison · 1125 Collins Street · Opened 1858

Midnight
Infiltration

A first-person urban-exploration game through Boyington & Wheelock's limestone castle, rendered in its present decayed condition. No weapons. No enemies. Just the building, the dark, and the question of what is sealed under the east cell house.

Enter the site Go straight to the Void

Runs in the browser. Needs WebGL2 · desktop only — keyboard & mouse or gamepad · headphones recommended.

Work in progress. Two locations are built — the perimeter wall and the sealed sub-level beneath the east block. There is no way to walk between them yet, and there are no touch controls, so phones and tablets will tell you to come back on a desktop.

Not a shooter

This is a traversal and observation game. You walk, crouch, crawl, climb and lean through a real building at night with a headlamp and a finite battery. Tension comes from darkness, sound, structural instability and light management — never from anything that shoots back.

01

No instant-fail

A missed step costs stamina and makes noise. It does not kill you. Detection warns twice and resets locally — never from scratch. Checkpoints land every 60–90 seconds.

02

Earn the lights

Sequence the boiler valves and relay board in the powerhouse and lights come on across the whole map — permanently changing every later scene.

03

Read the walls

Around 25 collectible documents, photographs and audio logs. Each one is tied to a cited fact about the real site.

Four people, one radio

You play one of them. The other three are live on comms for the entire run — arguing, remembering, and losing signal as you go deeper. The role you pick is a perspective, not a separate campaign: same building, different way of seeing it.

The Director

Greg

Wants the void confirmed and documented so the history can't be sanitised again. Treats the building as an artifact and the people in it as footnotes.

Architectural Insight — overlays period blueprints on the live world, ghosting weak points, sealed openings, and original versus later construction.
The Veteran Guard

Mike

Worked the wall from 1994 to 2002. Wants to walk out having proven to himself the place is just a building now. He already suspects what's down there.

Institutional Knowledge — bypasses mechanical locks, calls patrol geometry from memory, and talks the crew down when the stress climbs.
The Documentarian

Jsn

Wants the shot nobody else has. Frames risk as content; the camera is how he avoids feeling anything.

Tech & Optics — thermal and low-light modes, a spatial scan that finds cavities behind masonry, and a battery economy that forces a choice between seeing and recording.
The First-Timer

Lonnie

Wants to not be the reason something goes wrong. Defers to whoever sounds most certain. He's the only one who reacts to it as a place where people suffered.

Adrenaline — stamina recovers faster under stress, and improvised solutions surface to him that the others walk straight past.

The building is the point

Every wall, tower and corridor is modelled from research and site photography of the real Old Joliet Prison — the Gothic Revival limestone castle at 1125 Collins Street, opened 1858, closed 2002, now a museum. Rusticated quarry-faced stone, corbelled cap courses, octagonal glazed tower cabs on tapered shafts, and the specific way institutional paint delaminates: cream over mustard over blue-grey over bare block.

It is not Stateville

Stateville is the nearby prison with the round panopticon "roundhouse". Joliet has no such building and never did. Conflating the two is the most common error made about this site, and the game refuses to make it.

What's true, and what isn't

The prison was built with convict labour from limestone the inmates quarried on site. The men held there cut the stone that held them. That is documented, and it is why the story exists.

The sealed sub-level the game builds toward is fiction. The game says so, on screen, at the end — and every other liberty is listed in the repository's HISTORICAL-LIBERTIES.md.

The scenario is fictional and presented as sanctioned after-hours access. The real site is an operating museum that runs public tours — that is the legitimate way in, and the end cards point you at it.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse, or gamepad. Everything is remappable, and every audio cue has a visual channel.

WASD Move
Shift Sprint
C Crouch
Z Crawl
Space Climb / vault
E Interact
F Headlamp
Q Role ability
Tab Journal
Esc Pause & settings

Head-bob, motion blur, film grain and vignette are all independently adjustable to zero. prefers-reduced-motion is respected on first run. Subtitles are on by default, with speaker names.